Continuing with art

I have been distracted from my diatribe by Heidegger and consequently have spent the last few days reading him, as I should be doing, rather than random blog posts. In any case, I shall continue with my diatribe once this current burst of philosophical mindfullness has digressed once again into intense word loss. In reading Heidegger I'm finding words returning, but generally only on a Heideggerian level which excludes any normal form of social linguistic interaction. Anyway... that was just a note... here's my latest post.


I find something inherently masochistic within the pursuit of philosophy; a decisive pain in unravelling a myriad of concepts and trying to put them into some sort of context, a detachment and loss as with each thing you learn makes you feel that you have to know more, and yet, at the same time, an overwhelming joy of discovery, the pleasure in immersing yourself in the text of a philosopher, losing yourself in concepts and language and poetry in an overwhelming sense of wonder. And then there's those philosophers who throw you to the ground and kick you about so hard that you can't stop laughing and crying. The first for me was Nietzsche. After being pumped with Plato and Aristotle and Descartes and Hegel etc etc, Nietzsche opened up something new. The way he writes, the moods he invokes, the process of becoming, the eternal return. I don't think I would have the words to express just what it is that Nietzsche does. And then Deleuze (and of course his works with Guattari).... I read Anti-Oedipus while living alone in Prague and it completely stunned me. I'd never come across anything like it and I spent hours poring over the words trying to figure it all out. I still haven't, and maybe I never will but, to the rue of my lecturers (they think it's too hard), Deleuze, and D&G, make me smile.

And then Heidegger, the man of the moment. When I first came across Heidegger's notion of anxiety and nothingness I felt as though someone had gripped me about the throat and started strangling me. After my initial stupefication (which lasted a few weeks) I was still dazzled by his work, especially his later works when he takes on a more performative tone. However, I don't entirely agree with his ontology. I don't think that ontology is static, we are always involved in a process of becoming. If becoming is fixed as being then we lose much of what it is to be human. People are dynamic, changing, always adapting. It is rare for someone to look at themselves as a self, to say 'I am a self, I will always be this self.' We are social creatures, bound up in our environments and with other creatures. So Heidegger, however nice it would be to be Dasein, I don't think we are quite so stable.

In any case, onto what I wanted to talk about. This evening Herr Heidegger and I sat down to continue our discussion on art. This ties in with the discussion about art on the thread below and I always need to have a complete system wash out after having finished a text otherwise I will lose it.

I get all excited about paired words: form / matter, major / minor, molar / molecular, heterogeneous / homogenous etc etc. Heidegger gives us earth and world. If art instigates the strife between earth and world then contemporary art is sadly lacking. One of my favourite pieces of art is a piece by Jan Preisler entitled 'Winter.' I came across it while in Prague and although I wasn't too excited about the artist's other work, this piece grabbed me. Unfortunately I can't find it anywhere on the net and there's no books about it in the library so I simply have to recall it from memory. It portrays a shepherd boy in his world, with a flock of sheep behind him. It is painted in black and white. You can see that he is very much immersed in this world and yet there is a melancholia that lurks within his eyes, an awareness of the cold death that winter brings, of his grounding upon the earth. The earth obtrudes through the world, making itself very much present in all its self concealment. There is something within the picture that cannot be grasped, something that eludes us. Preisler has succeeded in disclosing a world and the strife that exists between it and the earth. The world is rested upon the ungraspable, sheltered by the earth to which it will eventually return. I spent a lot of time standing in front of this painting, it set forth a questioning, evoked emotion, brought me into a certain frame of mind; unsettling.

In contrast to this we have one of the works of British contemporary art. Tracy Emin's 'My Bed' portrays what it says, her bed. It is meant to be a testimony to her 'sluttish personality,' a treatise on who she is. There is an overabundance of world and not a hint of earth. There is nothing that obtrudes within this piece, nothing that draws us into questioning. If the work of art 'let's the earth be an earth,' then how can this be called a work when there is no earth present? Perhaps it might be argued that we are such cultural beings that we have no need for earth. But the world is grounded upon the earth, it cannot be disputed that we live upon the earth and that we take what we will from it. When I look out my window I see no sign of earth, I see buildings, roads, trees planted by man and street lights. Earth has vanished from the cities. Modern art has become a reflection of this condition, we rarely come across the self-secluding overwhelming-ness of earth and so art reflects only world; strife has been lost, and so the unfolding that occurs in the strife between earth and world is lost with it.

For Heidegger, art cannot be thought of as art without earth and world. They are bound in an endless struggle that constitutes the work-being of the work. If a 'work' does not contain this struggle then can it possibly be called a work anymore? A work without work-being is nothing more than an object.

Of course, it can be argued that there is no truth and so Heidegger must be wrong. Truth is created and destroyed through discourse and power, I would agree, truth fluxes and changes as much as being. However, truth thought as aletheia is an unconcealment, a bringing into presence of something that has long remained concealed. Preisler's piece discloses unfolds a truth, the truth of the melancholic world of the shepherd, the assuredness of a cold winter, the harshness of life. He reminds us that we live in an immanent world that is always there and always obtrudes. Or, as in Heidegger's example, Van Gogh's peasant shoes bring forth the world of the peasant woman, a world that always in struggle with the earth. There is a truth in that the truth consists in the harsh world of the peasant woman as it is true for her. In contrast Emin's work does little to remind us of anything. In looking at it I am not moved, I am not reminded of anything in particular except what it might look like in her bedroom.

Art today has become a reflection of the technicity of our age. It accepts the fact that we are cultural beings and stretches it into extreme concepts about the capitalist condition. A sculpture no longer unfolds from marble, colour no longer shines forth from a painting. What remains is an unmade bed that needs an artist’s statement to explain the concepts behind it. An artist's statement and title should never be necessary, the work should shine forth as a work. So many concepts, so little talent. An artist is not a philosopher. An artist should be able to create a work of beauty, sublimity, even horror; their skill should lie in perception, but it is rare to find an artist with the rigour of a philosopher. They should perceive truth and allow it be as it is; unspoken, unfolded from their creation. A painting should contain its own language and the artwork should elude interpretation.

What I love about 'The Origin of the Work of Art,' is that it reminds us of the potentiality that art has to open something up to us, to unconceal something, almost a form of magic. However it also reminds us of what has been lost. In its earliest stages art had the capacity to found worlds, in later stages it could disclose truths but now art seems to reflect the loss of wonder that is so apparent in late capitalism. Ideally art should be able to take us from capitalism, from our constant state of change, and place us in the reflection of its being so that the assimilation that capitalism does so well might be subverted. Standing in front of a great work has a magical quality to it, being drawn into it so that you are lost and what is left existing is something that shines so much that it occludes your sense of self. Art does not do that any more, all that we have left to us is assemblages of objects or colours that stand beside shiny white placards with generic fonts that quip about concepts and have no appeal except their price tags

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